


Ivory and Gold

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Implied Canonical Sibling Incest, Infidelity, Moral Ambiguity, Murder, Obsessive Ageism, Royalty in Compromising Positions, dodgy political dealings, rampant classical allusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:39:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like a spill of corrupted blood through the veins of history she snaked, forging pathways never before seen, rewriting time itself even as she reflected ever outward a perfect, unchanging beauty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ivory and Gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vnutrenni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vnutrenni/gifts).



> This story contains elements that appear in the Extended Edition of the film as well as brief referential crossovers to various mythologies and a smattering of late medieval history (specifics will be referenced in endnotes). I understand the novelization gives Ravenna a very different origin story from the film (for reasons unknown), but I haven't read it so any similarities are coincidental. A thousand, thousand thanks to my wonderful beta-readers, K., R., and W.
> 
> To my recipient--I adored your AU prompt, but I'm afraid it simply didn't fit into the fic, so my apologies for that! I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!

_The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history_.

– Oscar Wilde, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_

 

 

She was not always Ravenna. Nor was the world always as it became.

 

Like a spill of corrupted blood through the veins of history she snaked, forging pathways never before seen, rewriting time itself even as she reflected ever outward a perfect, unchanging beauty.

 

That was her mother's gift, so many years and decades and even centuries ago that she barely recalled it. _Your power and protection_ , she had said, as three drops of her own precious blood stained the white expanse of a bowl of milk. The king's soldiers slit her mother's throat moments later, and the fountain of red left a wild pattern like poppies on the snow.

 

 _Revenge us_.

 

***

 

She still remembered her mother's face. Pale hair like the water witches of the Rhine, and eyes that always saw too much and too far. The king had sought her out to coax his barren queen into producing an heir, and Ravenna only understood too late that the elaborate spell her mother spent the next several months crafting had nothing to do with the king's orders. When he returned on the appointed day and she handed him the vial intended for the queen, it seemed his eyes lingered instead on Ravenna, whose sixteen-year-old beauty bloomed like a fragile rose in winter.

 

The longed-for heir never appeared. Instead, the king stormed into their village and made his displeasure known.

 

There were only two survivors. Ravenna, plucked from her mother's arms and slung over the king's saddle, and Finn, crouched in a snowdrift, his own paleness hiding him from unfriendly eyes. As her eyes met his, she shook her head briefly. _Wait for me, brother. I will come for you_.

 

The party stopped for the night at one of the king's hunting lodges. Someone must have sent word ahead, for there were fires and food waiting. Ravenna lingered on the edges of the revelry, snatching food from passing trenchers richer than any she had ever eaten before. Her stomach heaved a little but she forced herself to breathe; better to eat now while she had the chance.

 

Suddenly the room went silent around her and she realised the king was looking at her. Lowering the half-eaten chicken leg still pinched between her fingers, she tossed it on the floor with as much dignity as she could muster. One of the hounds slunk forward and snatched it up. Ravenna swept one hand across her mouth and sank to her knees.

 

"You're filthy," the king remarked. He turned to the velvet-clad man beside him and murmured something Ravenna couldn't hear. "Come here, girl."

 

She rose and moved forward, conscious of twenty sets of men's eyes upon her, hearing the words of her mother's spell circling in her head, _your power and protection_. As she walked, she straightened her back and raised her chin and ignored the terrified shaking in her knees.

 

By the time she reached the king's side, servants had dragged a large copper tub from the kitchens to the centre of the room. They had begun to fill it with hot water, and Ravenna stared, transfixed, hungry once more but no longer for food. After a few moments, she looked back at the king. "Here, sire?"

 

He gestured assent, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. The hate coiled in Ravenna's throat and threatened to choke her, but instead she smiled. _Your power and protection_. The king's face froze, his breath caught. She had hooked him, helpless as a fish on a line.

 

Ravenna reached for the laces of her gown. They tangled in her shaking fingers and she heard the rustling and impatient murmuring behind her. The king shifted in his seat, though his eyes did not leave hers. The dress slipped from her shoulders.

 

She could hear a strangled sound in his throat. Ravenna's smile curved along her lips, with just a small flash of even white teeth.

 

"By your leave, sire," she heard herself say. He nodded, near-imperceptibly. Ravenna sank into the water just as her knees gave way beneath her.

 

It felt like heaven.

 

***

 

He nicknamed her Lorelei. Appropriate, he joked, since she'd surely bewitched him. "I can think of nothing else," he whispered against her skin as he lay with her in the tower room where he had installed her upon their arrival. "They say the _lorelei_ lures sailors to their doom with songs of desire."

 

Ravenna turned beneath him and dragged one of her fingernails across the hollow of his throat. "I am no singer, my lord."

 

More to her taste was the story of the ancient Spartan queen whose beauty had brought down kingdoms in her wake. Married against her will to an ageing Greek king, she had fled her husband's domains in the arms of a young soldier and started a war that wasted ten years and countless lives. The king had told her the outlines of the story as his lips memorised her body. When he touched her, Ravenna closed her eyes and imagined Helen in her lover's arms as the ship carried them away from her prison, toward ruin and rapture.

 

With the money the careless king threw her way, Ravenna engaged tutors and taught herself the languages of men. Instead of the king telling her stories, she began to read them for herself. She cultivated the royal advisors, luring them into telling her tales of their compatriots. She learnt their alliances, their weaknesses. Fear, she quickly learnt, could be as effective as lust.

 

"They say he spends more time in your bed than in the queen's," the Lord Chief Justice told her, his hand hot on her thigh. "Whatever do you do to him?"

 

Ravenna reached between his legs and gripped just hard enough that he squeaked. "Your hands wander, my lord. I do not think the king would take kindly to such incursions."

 

She endured the same from every man in court, panting after her like dogs. The queen's ladies glared daggers at her in the meantime, though she was nominally one of their number. Some made it clear that they would change their allegiance should her star eclipse the queen's but for now pretended she did not exist. Those, she remembered. For them, there would be a special kind of vengeance.

 

What she needed most of all was an ally, one she could trust implicitly.

 

There was an abbey on the far side of the mountain from where their village had stood. Ravenna knew it well, for the abbot had been known to consult her mother on matters of medicine when his own knowledge failed him. One day, some years after she arrived at court, she stood before the queen and begged to make a pilgrimage there to pray for her mother's soul. The queen, eager to see her husband's mistress gone, gave hearty consent, and Ravenna set off on one of the finest horses in the royal stables, a squire in royal livery following to guarantee her safety.

 

She found Finn in the scriptorium, tonsured head bent over a lectern. Before him was a perfectly scraped piece of vellum half-filled with intricate black writing. "Three years well spent, dear brother," she murmured. "You must teach me now."

 

He was only a year or two her junior but still a child in so many ways. A quiet, patient boy with a God-given talent, or so the abbot told her, visibly uneasy in her presence. It had been her mother's wish that Finn take his place amongst his brothers in Christ, and surely it was clear that he was happy in the seclusion of the abbey.

 

"I need him with me, father," Ravenna told the abbot, holding out a heavy purse of the king's gold. "I find I am in need of a confessor, and who better than my own kin?"

 

The abbot took the purse with a frown; Ravenna knew well that the abbey's isolation meant gifts were infrequent, let alone one of this magnitude. Brother Finn was ordered to pack his belongings in preparation for his new position as confessor to the Lady Ravenna, and the abbot's insistence that they stay the night instead of travelling in the dark was notably half-hearted.

 

The moon was at its height when they reached the ruins of the village. Ravenna jumped down from her horse and motioned for the squire to wait. He was half in love with her already and would not flee for fear of disgracing himself before her. Finn, she led by the hand.

 

The fire had consumed all but the hearth of their home. Ravenna crept forward and tugged at the third stone from the left corner just as she had seen her mother do. It gave way, dislodging a cloud of ash and dust. She sneezed. "Help me, Finn!"

 

Without a word, he grabbed the opposite side of the hearthstone and wrenched it backward. Ravenna reached into the black hollow now exposed and drew out a small, round object made of polished copper. She turned it over, running her fingers across the arcane symbols carved around the border. Every night, her mother had poured fresh spring water into the dish and stared into its depths as though hypnotised. It was the source of her power, Ravenna knew.

 

There were three vials in the hollow as well, each sealed with wax. She realised for the first time what she had not noticed for years as a child--that the wax was black, an unlikely luxury for a village midwife. She saw too the seal stamped on the top of the cork, a raven on a shield. The guardsman who killed Ravenna's mother had stolen the ring that made that crest, but Ravenna reclaimed it when he was found mysteriously dead upon their arrival in the castle.

 

"Finn," she whispered, "did Mama ever tell you the story of how she came to the village?"

 

Ravenna had heard it countless times as a cautionary tale regarding the wiles of young men, but her brother shook his head. "She fell in love, Finn. She was an apothecary's daughter and she fell in love with the younger son of a count." The signet ring had been a gift from him, Ravenna's name a strange and pointed tribute. Reaching out, she slipped her arm around Finn, cradling his head against her shoulder. His hair was soft as goosedown beneath her fingers and she pressed her lips to the shaved circle at his crown. He shivered at the touch. "He ruined her, brother. Her father cast her out, her family abandoned her, and so she fled to the hills. When she first arrived, it had been three years since the women of the village had been able to bring a healthy child to term. She gave them children and they worshipped her as a goddess."

 

They cared not that she arrived in the village great with child and without even a name to give the father. Nor did they care when Ravenna's mother returned from a journey to the abbey and less than a year later gave birth to a son as meek and quiet as any monk. The abbot had stopped asking for her mother's advice after that visit.

 

"Until the king came," Finn whispered, his breath warm against her skin. Ravenna kissed him again.

 

"Until the king came. And that is why we shall avenge her, brother, you and I. I will enslave this king until he destroys himself for love of me. And you will make certain that we profit by it."

 

***

 

It is an old story and a tired one. Rumours spread across the land that the king had poisoned the queen out of lust for his mistress. Ravenna was crowned on Midsummer's Eve and every chronicler in the land wrote of her beauty and the fear it wrought. That night, she gazed into her mother's copper mirror for the first time and did not recognise what she saw.

 

 _By fairest blood it is done_.

 

Hers was a face carved from finest alabaster, the lines of her cheekbones sharp as the daggers she kept sheathed in her sleeves and bodice. It was not the face she remembered, although she could discern the recalled outlines somewhere, blurred beyond recognition. Even Finn seemed to shrink from her now.

 

She kept him by her side as her clerk and confessor, each lingering touch binding him closer like skeins of spidersilk. He still prayed when he knew she wasn't watching and she let him pray. She even let him continue the trade he had loved so much in the abbey. The court delighted in Finn's little paintings, begging him to leave off Books of Hours in favour of romances, and slowly he began to forget the years of seclusion.

 

The king, however, had been lamenting the exertions of middle age when he took Ravenna for his own and was now well past his prime. Jealous as only an old man could be of a young and beautiful wife, he fell into a rage one day and ordered all the young men to cease any interaction with his queen. Even Ravenna's pleas fell on deaf ears until she retreated to her chamber to compose a new plan for escape.

 

That was when the sorcerer from the north arrived at court.

 

His name was Sigurd. He brought with him two guards and a covered wagon whose contents he flatly forbade to disclose to any save the king. Once admitted to the great hall, he conjured a series of illusions that left the entire court breathless. Dragons emerged from the ceiling rafters and gryphons from the tapestries that lined the walls, only to vanish as soon as touched. He told the king tales of a phantom army that could appear and disappear at the will of its commander and the king, bewitched, did not see Sigurd's eyes stray to Ravenna, or the looks Ravenna darted back.

 

Ravenna found him later that evening on the battlements. Without a word he led her to the chamber he had been given, one of the finest the castle had to offer. On the wall was a large circle of brass polished so smoothly that she could see her face as clearly as in still water. Around the edge were markings that looked strangely like branches--not at all like the curving symbols that edged her mother's mirror.

 

Something moved across the surface. Ravenna jumped backward and Sigurd laughed. "I knew he would awaken for you, my lady."

 

"He?" she whispered. "Who is he?"

 

"One who knows true beauty when he sees it, and who craves it all the more, knowing its rarity. You, my queen, are a treasure beyond price."

 

When he kissed her, she was certain they were being watched. Indeed, as Ravenna straddled his writhing form, she gazed into the mirror above and knew beyond any doubt that something was gazing back at her. She raised her chin and smiled, just as the man beneath her groaned his release. A shudder ran through the metal like wind through silk.

 

She did not sleep. Instead, when Sigurd slipped into slumber, Ravenna rose from the bed and stood before the mirror.

 

"Speak to me," she said, holding out one hand. "By fairest blood, I command you, speak to me."

 

Something flickered at the centre of the mirror, as though the metal were melting in a forge. Part fabric, part liquid, the reflective _thing_ slithered down the wall to pool on the flagstones. It advanced upon her and Ravenna stood her ground though her heart thudded like a hammer on an anvil.

 

The metal reformed, coalesced, twisted itself into a figure as tall as Ravenna, draped in layer upon layer of non-fabric that reflected dozens of distorted Ravennas back to her.

 

"What is your wish, my lady?"

 

Ravenna's mouth opened and closed. Without thinking, she said, "Power."

 

"You have power, my lady, yet you do not see it." The thing had no face; all Ravenna could see were her own eyes, wide with fear and exhilaration. "Do you not control the king?"

 

"I am yet at his mercy. Make me free of him." She swallowed. "That is my wish. I want power enough that no man will ever ruin me again."

 

Perhaps it was her own smile reflected that she saw, but it seemed to her that the creature laughed. "Fear not, my lady. No man will ever defeat you."

 

***

 

There was a story one of the travelling poets had brought from over the mountains of a young knight falsely maligned by a queen. She accused him of dishonouring her and the furious king condemned him to death. The story had had a happy ending, she recalled--much to her ladies' delight--where the knight was reprieved by his lady, a queen of fairyland, and she carried him off to her kingdom, leaving the king and his court staring after them like fools.

 

Ravenna alone had pitied the queen.

 

Her husband would grow jealous sooner or later. That much was inevitable, but for once, she was guilty. The king's wrinkled flesh sickened her, and she could not deny that Sigurd had slaked a hunger she had not realised was in her. And, of course, he had brought her the mirror.

 

For that, she would make certain his death was quick.

 

***

 

Ravenna's second life began on the night the king mysteriously died. Bad meat was the doctor's verdict, though many in the court threw covert glances at Ravenna's veiled form. The king had no heirs, leaving his lands in a shambles as the court fought over the scraps. Ravenna and Finn did not wait even for the funeral before they escaped in the dead of night, a carefully chosen band of forty guardsmen with them. In their midst was a wagon laden with the greatest prizes in the royal treasury, catalogued and verified by Finn himself over the years. Among them was the mirror, from which Ravenna refused to be parted, practicality be damned.

 

They travelled north, toward the sea. Word would spread soon enough of the king's demise and the disappearance of his queen, and the further ahead they could be, the better. Whenever they passed within sight of even the smallest village, it seemed the ranks of guardsmen swelled by thrice the number, giving the impression of a dark army moving across the country at an unearthly pace.

 

They arrived at the harbour just as a fleet of warships from the wild lands across the sea finished plundering the town. Ravenna stepped into the cabin on board the commanding ship and within five minutes, the fleet's leader was on his knees before her.

 

***

 

Ravenna loved the sea.

 

She had always felt trapped by the mountains of her homeland and could have stared forever into the horizon. When her lover was struck by an axe on the savage Orkney Isles, she had already shed those of her guard who had not taken to the sea. They waited for her back on the mainland with Finn, who detested the ocean as much as Ravenna loved it.

 

Ravenna took command of the ship, now renamed the _Maiden_ , and wreaked bloody revenge with an army who melted into thin air after the battle was done. The bodies burned in a great pyre on the rocky shore and the remaining men of the fleet swore to follow her to the great halls of their gods.

 

Westward they sailed, past Hibernia to the strange, fire-belching island beyond. There, Ravenna lingered for a season and when she left, the creatures she coaxed from the air had a new and glittering sharpness to them. Instead of bending like metal, they now shattered and reformed in bursts of deadly fragments.

 

"Obsidian," Finn said when he looked at one of the chest full of black shards she had brought with her. "More mirrors, sister? Will you remake the world in your image?"

 

"Such blasphemy," she remonstrated, pressing one finger to his lips. "I've missed you, my dearest."

 

"And I you." He captured her hand. "My queen."

 

It would be impossible now to mistake her brother for a monk. He only wore the softest of wool, edged in fur, and always black. It was the one thing on which he insisted. _I was a black monk, sister. Leave me this_. There were lines on his face now, the finest tracery beside his eyes and lips.

 

Finn's mouth tickled the pulse at her wrist and Ravenna closed her eyes. "They ask me, you know, who you will choose for your next consort."

 

"Why must I have a consort?" Ravenna asked. "My soldiers follow me at sea. Why not on land?"

 

"It is not your soldiers who concern you now." She snatched her hand away from Finn with a sound of disgust, but he persisted. "Sister, it is not my fault, but this is the truth nonetheless. Most men will not abide a woman ruling a kingdom."

 

Ravenna spun, her fists clenched at her sides. "Then I will _make_ them abide it."

 

***

 

Without warning, however, her powers seemed to falter. When she looked into the mirror, she saw the veins beneath her skin, the lines suddenly grown dark as ink.

 

There were words, she remembered, that conjured the creature from the mirror. Ravenna held out her hand and said, "By fairest blood, I conjure you. Speak to me."

 

Nothing.

 

Fear formed a pit in her stomach.

 

"By fairest blood," she repeated, trying desperately to keep her voice from shaking, "I conjure you!"

 

"Who are you talking to, sister?" Ravenna spun on her heel to find Finn in the doorway. "Don't order me out, not now. Tell me, what is this thing I guard with my life when you are away?"

 

"This _thing_ is the reason we are not starving in the streets," she snapped. "You never questioned me before. Why now?"

 

"Because you have a decision to make. Either you take a consort and rule here, or you and I must move on. The people grow restive."

 

"Restive?" echoed Ravenna. "Have I not given them all? We are more powerful than ever we have been--are they not showered with plundered gold, with all the glory they can possibly want?"

 

"I cannot control them!" He grabbed her shoulders. "Sister, please. I would follow you to the ends of the earth, but I am only one man. If you are to remake the world, my love, it must be piece by piece."

 

Ravenna laughed, the sound on the edge of a sob. "Is that so?" She leant against him, feeling him hesitate at first, frozen in place, and then sink into the embrace with an audible sigh. "Why do my powers wane, Finn? What have I done?"

 

"Did your magician keep no records? Nothing to teach those after him?"

 

"Magic inspires jealousy, brother, more often than it inspires friendship. I paid a price for what he told me and was no doubt lucky he didn't lie." Even as she said it, she recalled the vials she had retrieved from their old cottage and the white liquid within. Turning in Finn's arms, she pressed her lips to his. "Thank you, my dearest."

 

She pretended not to see the look with which he followed her.

 

***

 

Her mother had left her three vials. That was the intended duration of her spell, a generous lifetime by any standard. Ravenna told herself she did not keep track, but some malicious corner of her mind demanded that every year on her birthday she write one thing on the flyleaf of the Book of Hours her mother had left. It had had blank spaces when they lived in the village, but Finn had given each month a painstakingly beautiful image where the face of each small figure looked like a recognisable person from when she was queen.

 

It was slowly becoming the only way she could remember her first husband's face.

 

As soon as she drained the last of the potion from the first vial, it was as though her body were righting itself, shrinking and firming, her joints no longer aching with every movement. When she found the nerve to once again face the mirror, she looked into the reflection she remembered with enough relief that tears started in her eyes.

 

"By fairest blood--" she caught herself in sudden fear, but forced onward, "I conjure you, speak to me." The last words were barely audible.

 

Tears had tracked their way down her cheeks by the time the figure of molten metal stood before her in silent contemplation.

 

"My lady."

 

"Why did you not come before?" she demanded, starting to pace back and forth before the creature, half an eye on the thousand variations of her reflection that moved with her. "Tell me why, I demand to know!"

 

"You were not the fairest, my lady."

 

Ravenna stopped in her tracks. "What do you mean?"

 

"There was another."

 

"Another what? Another _where_?"

 

"Fairer than you. Within my sight."

 

"Your sight?" She had followed Finn's advice and made sure there had been nothing of Sigurd's that she had missed. He had not struck her as the sort of man who made notes of his studies. Not like Finn, on whose meticulous mind she relied so closely. " How far, pray, does your sight stretch?"

 

If the creature could have rolled its eyes, Ravenna was certain it would have done so. "My sight stretches as far as it stretches, my lady. I do not think in lengths and widths. I know what I see, and the fairest blood was not yours."

 

"It is now?"

 

"Now."

 

Ravenna forced herself to stop and to look directly into the creature's smooth face, into her own eyes, wide as they were with fear. "And my mother's potion can stop this."

 

"For a time. Until it is gone. Farewell, my lady."

 

Ravenna stood for a time afterward watching the mirror in silence. If Sigurd would not help her from beyond the grave, then she would help herself.

 

When she came face-to-face with Finn the next morning, however, her plans crashed to a halt. Her brother was _old_.

 

His hair had long since faded from its cornsilk blond to white. Though she stood before him in the fullest bloom of her beauty, Finn had lived long enough to father a family twice over and every year was written on his face.

 

Ravenna watched him in silence for a few moments before holding out her hand. "What do you want, Finn? Anything in the world that you want shall be yours."

 

Finn gripped her fingers in his and studied them. Then, he looked up at her, his grey eyes pale and haunted. "Can you give me peace, sister?"

 

She gathered him close, as she had when they were children huddling together for warmth. "My poor dear, anything but that. This magic does not deal in peace." Cradling his face between her hands, she sank to her knees before him. "But I can give you life, brother. I can give you youth."

 

***

 

It was too simple, and she ought to have guessed that from the start. Recreating her mother's spell proved easier than expected since Ravenna had long since surpassed her mother in power.

 

"By fairest blood it is done," she said, as three drops of blood sank into the white surface of the potion. "Drink, my dear." As ever, Finn obeyed. Then, setting the bowl down, he kissed her hand, the cut already healed by magic. Ravenna smiled. "I will not lose you, Finn. Whatever should I do without you?"

 

The potion worked perfectly on Finn. On Ravenna, not at all. She wondered if she heard laughter in the mirror's response to her rage. _It is your own blood, my lady. Your flesh knows not the difference_.

 

No doubt the secret lay in the mirror itself. She resolved to find it out.

 

***

 

There were many who had written of mirrors, magic or otherwise, and it was rare for any of them to agree with one another. Ravenna read of copper mirrors and brass and gold and silver, and even glass, an art long lost, or so it was said. Her favoured obsidian too, prized for its rarity and the dangers involved in finding it.

 

She lost nearly twenty years to the extensive study of runes, desperate to read the markings on the mirror's edge. Every time she tried, the translation was unintelligible, a random assortment of words and images from which she could derive neither rhyme nor reason. It was partly due to this, when Ravenna's fury at another failed attempt had caused an entire wing of their castle to collapse, that Finn suggested a different tactic, one now possible with the passage of centuries instead of mere months and years.

 

Depending on how one kept count, it was in her sixth life that Ravenna first encountered a city. Here, she found a library, and within that library, a vast collection of books containing centuries of lore in alchemy and magic. Nearly all of them were useless. Most, Finn had to borrow on her behalf since women were not permitted within the reading rooms.

 

This was a beautiful and strange place, a maze of canals and bridges, echoing with dozens of languages and built on trade from all corners of the world, including her old haunts of fire and brimstone. She had never seen streets more alive with possibility. The markets were filled with silks and spices and treasures from the east, while rumours abounded of lands far to the west where there were entire cities built of gold. Ravenna wondered if she might someday sail beyond the sunset and what she might find there.

 

They did not stay long. She feared she might fall in love with a place, far more difficult to leave behind than a person.

 

***

 

One of the first discoveries Finn had made upon their arrival in the city was a book that spoke of a great brass mirror forged in one of the eastern empires. When the Great Khan swept his way across the steppes, toppling entire civilisations in his wake, it disappeared.

 

It was that tale, and the complete absence of stories from Sigurd's land, that made Ravenna look once more at the runes and, with lips pinched into a thin and furious line, enlist the assistance of a renowned goldsmith known for crafting alchemical instruments.

 

The man studied the mirror's carved border through a chunk of thick glass framed in gold, through which it was possible to see the smallest details of the design and even the tiniest mistakes in its crafting. When he stepped away, it was with a sigh.

 

"I fear, Madonna Elena, that these markings are of no help at all. They were added much later and they mean nothing."

 

"Nothing," echoed Ravenna flatly. "You tell me I have wasted years, _years_ of my life, on frippery?"

 

"Not frippery, my lady. Disguise." There was admiration in the man's eyes as he gazed on the mirror. "Hidden in plain sight. Some slapdash runic carving, and one of the greatest treasures of ancient Babylon disappears forever." He turned, a shadow crossing his face as he met Ravenna's eyes. "How did _you_ come by it, my lady?"

 

Ravenna smiled. "A gift. An offering, perhaps."

 

"What do you see in it, my lady? I do not doubt that you see something."

 

"I see..." She could not tell him the truth. "I see beauty. The fairest of them all."

 

Yet somewhere in the darkness, time ticked on.

 

 _You are the fairest until I decide otherwise_.

 

***

 

The nervousness in Ravenna's reflected features made her look younger still. She stood before the mirror and waited as the pool of liquid metal coalesced into the cloaked figure she now saw every night in her dreams. He never touched her, yet she could feel his unseen gaze on her, ever watchful and ever dissatisfied.

 

"You are the fairest, my lady."

 

"For now."

 

"Is it not enough?"

 

Ravenna blinked. "Enough?"

 

"You have lived the lives of six women, my lady. You are the fairest creature in the world. You have seen and wielded power beyond the ken of most mortals. Is that not enough?"

 

"And still men bar me from their libraries, from their counsels. Why should they rule me when they are barely worthy to look upon me?" Sweeping the heavy brocaded skirts aside, she began to pace as she always did when agitated. "What do _I_ owe _them_?"

 

The creature was silent for some time, a picture of eternal contemplation. Finally, in a voice that coiled like the poisonous snakes from its native land, it spoke, and its words ignited something in Ravenna that would never again be silent.

 

"There is one thing, my lady. One spell that would give you dominion over nature as well as man, but like all other magic, it carries a heavy price."

 

"What is the price?" She was still again, staring into her reflected eyes and wondering if the creature was looking back at her. "My soul? Are you a demon, then?"

 

"No more than you are a witch, my lady."

 

"Who were you?"

 

"I no longer remember, my lady. If you should live as long as I, nor will you."

 

Ravenna swallowed against the fluttering in her stomach. "The price, mirror. What is the price?"

 

The creature's head shifted, almost imperceptibly, and Ravenna had a sudden sense of yawning emptiness staring into her, as though it were seeing her, truly _seeing_ her, for the first time. "You are the price, my lady. Bind yourself--the fairest blood--to this vessel, and you can keep your youth and your power."

 

She caught her breath, words failing her for a few moments. "You've denied me before, do you remember? You told me yourself that my powers would fail if I were not the fairest of all. How am I to trust you?"

 

"I can see such beauty when it first blooms, my lady. Early enough for it to be plucked." She could almost see her own eyebrow quirking at that, its lines distorted by the ripples that darted through the creature's form, a sort of strange, liquid laughter.

 

"And I shall simply remain as I am?" She made an expansive gesture downward. She always found herself choosing her finest garments when she faced the mirror, this one an especially fetching cloth-of-silver accented with lace thin as gossamer. "Provided I...prevent my rival from unseating me."

 

"Kill her," said the creature. Her beauty becomes your beauty; her youth your youth."

 

"I must consider this." Ravenna stepped back. "I will give you my answer anon."

 

Finn had gone forth in search of a new home for them. Although the villa beside its lazy river and the city whose domed churches and spires gleamed like so many stars in the distance tugged at her heart, they had already stayed too long. She was too conspicuous, too noticeable. Already people began to ask questions. The goldsmith's silence had been bought for the nonce--he was too well known to kill without consequence--but it would not last forever.

 

Finn arrived just after sunrise with a smile bright enough to see from the window. "Sister, I have found it! I have found our home."

 

He had become as dextrous a painter with words as he still was with his hands and Ravenna sank into a dream of a castle, perched like a watchful bird in the mist-shrouded Carpathian Mountains. The nearest neighbour was an infidel count with an unfortunate tendency to impale his enemies on pointed spikes but Finn and he had come to an agreement of sorts over the borders.

 

"We can live out our lives there, sister," Finn told her, his hands warm around hers. "At peace."

 

Ravenna closed her eyes. "Our lives, dearest?"

 

He stilled. "You have but one vial left of our mother's potion. Then it is done."

 

She did not have the heart to tell him otherwise.

 

***

 

After a carefully feigned illness, she and Finn disappeared in the dead of night yet again. There were moments when Ravenna wondered what it might be like to simply _stop_.

 

It sounded restful. It sounded terrifying.

 

***

 

The castle was indeed perfect, but Ravenna never doubted Finn's judgement in these matters. As usual, she claimed the tallest tower as her sanctum and waited, pacing back and forth before the window, as the mirror was carried slowly and ploddingly to join her.

 

That night, she drank the last of her mother's potion. That night she stood before the gleaming shadow-creature and spoke for the first time the words that would soon be engraved upon her mind forever.

 

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is fairest of them all?"

 

***

 

It was ten years before the answer to the question displeased her.

 

Her name was Lara and she was the daughter of a wheelwright in a village some ten leagues from the castle. Reluctant to involve Finn, Ravenna sent her steward to entice the girl with employment as a serving maid.

 

Even Ravenna caught her breath when the girl entered her chamber. Her skin was pale as the moon and her eyes a strikingly tawny brown; her hair fell in gleaming mahogany curls over perfectly shaped shoulders. Everything that ought to have been ordinary about her simply wasn't.

 

"Come closer, child," she said, beckoning with one hand. "Lara is your name, is it not?"

 

"Aye, m'lady." She bit her lip and Ravenna suppressed a shiver. "I'm a good worker, m'lady, I promise, and I won't make trouble."

 

"I cannot imagine you would." Reaching forward, she traced a delicate line along the girl's jaw. "Such a lovely face. Such youth and purity."

 

"Oh, but not compared to you, m'lady, surely not!" Lara's eyes widened. "Never. We all know our countess is the fairest in all the world." Rather to Finn's amusement it had become a point of pride for Ravenna's tenants, something she saw fit to encourage.

 

"You are a kind girl. Come to me again after supper."

 

She waited in the tower, watching as the sun set over the mountains to the west. When she turned at the sound of footsteps, she found Finn standing beside Lara in the doorway. "Your newest acquisition, sister. I commend you."

 

Ravenna smiled tightly. "I didn't realise you had returned from Vienna, dearest."

 

"Only just. I was on my way to see you when I came across Mistress Lara on her way to do the same." Crossing to Ravenna's side, he kissed her softly. "You look tired, my dear. Perhaps an early night."

 

"That was my plan, yes."

 

She waited until the last echo of his footfalls had died, but even then she did not speak. Behind her, she could hear Lara moving about until the girl stopped with a gasp. "Is that a looking-glass, m'lady?"

 

"Of sorts." The laughter in Ravenna's voice was just short of shrill. "Come here, child."

 

Lara's lips were the colour of ripe apples. Her breath quickened as Ravenna touched them. "You would serve me, Lara?"

 

"Aye, m'lady," she breathed. "Anything."

 

With slow, deliberate movements, her fingers brushing featherlight over the girl's skin, Ravenna undressed her until she stood, shivering, in the night air.

 

"So lovely," she murmured. "Such a pity."

 

"A pity?" the girl whispered. "Why, m'lady?"

 

Ravenna closed her eyes and met Lara's lips with her own. A soft moan escaped the girl's mouth and Ravenna trailed one finger down her neck and across her collarbone until she could feel the shuddering of the girl's heart beneath her hand.

 

"Because I fear, my poor dear girl, that I must take your heart."

 

Something surged within her, a dark, gnawing hunger, and she crushed the girl's body to hers, ignoring the cry of what had to be pain. She did not let go until the heartbeat fluttered to silence. When she stepped away and let the girl's body crumple to the flagstones, Ravenna's face was wet with tears.

 

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is fairest of them all?"

 

"You are the fairest, my queen."

 

***

 

It became easier with time, or so she told herself.

 

Lara sustained her for the better part of fifteen years. After her was Erzsbét, a golden-haired cherub who looked startlingly like Ravenna had done when her mother first cast her spell.

 

That was before the Turks came over the mountains. Ravenna raised armies from thin air to hold them at bay and her people hailed her as a second Judith, a Deborah who had saved them all from the fires of perdition. The price was two more girls whose names Ravenna never learnt. It was a price she happily paid.

 

She knew it was only a matter of time before people would begin to ask questions, and that the first person to ask would be Finn.

 

"What do you do with them, sister?" he asked her one day as they sat in the garden, his head pillowed on her skirts. "Those girls. You can't think I haven't noticed."

 

"What do you think I do with them?"

 

"There are rumours in Vienna that you bathe in their blood."

 

Ravenna laughed. "For what purpose, pray?"

 

Finn sat up and tilted her chin so she looked into his eyes. "Eternal youth. It is not so far from the truth, is it, sister?"

 

"I do not bathe in the blood of innocent virgins, Finn. It would be wasteful." Ravenna shrugged. "Surely you know me better than that. And, besides, our people are happy. They do not complain, do they?"

 

"Within your borders, sister, you are all-powerful. But without..."

 

She held up one hand to silence him. "Leave without to me."

 

***

 

To Finn's credit, he did leave it to her. The years stretched onward in their isolated kingdom, the people turning a carefully blind eye to the fact that their Countess never aged and their borders remained ever secure despite the lack of a standing army.

 

Outside their borders, however, the rumours grew wilder. Summons began to arrive, first from the local gentry, then from further afield in Vienna and Prague, and finally even one bearing the Pope's own seal from Rome, demanding that the Countess present herself before the Holy See to answer charges of grossest heresy and witchcraft.

 

Ravenna ignored them, of course. And when armies began to mass on the edges of her lands, she fought them off, drawing deeper and deeper into her power and the mirror's. In between the battles, she would send Finn and a cohort of handpicked men to a chosen location with careful instructions of who to bring back to her. She no longer saw the girls' faces as she sucked them dry.

 

Something too was happening to Finn, although it took Ravenna longer--too long--to see it. She had given him one final dose of their mother's potion after she bound herself to the mirror, and it seemed the mirror's power was able to pass through her to him without the potion. Sometimes when he returned from his errands for her, she would heal him with little more than a brush of her fingers over a wound. His face was as youthful as hers, but his eyes were yawning caverns in which the light had long ago died.

 

She should let him go. She could not let him go. No more than she could let go of herself, though all the world might demand it.

 

The harvests grew progressively worse, as though the life itself were being sucked from the land. The trees blackened and twisted, the grass shrivelled to nothingness. Finn would return from his voyages to find bodies rotting in the filthy streets, shadows scattering at his approach.

 

"We must go, sister. They may have loved you once, but they cannot now. The price is too high."

 

For what seemed to her the first time, Ravenna gazed from the windows at the ruins of her land. Her throat choked, not with tears, but with fury. "I am their lady."

 

"You are their murderer. That is how they see it." He slipped his arm around her waist. "We have no choice, my dear."

 

But still she tarried, something tugging at her that she could not see.

 

One night, in deepest winter, she dreamt of a castle perched on a rock above crashing grey waves. Within its bounds was a garden blanketed with snow, and in one corner, below a half-broken buttress, a branch that held one perfect red rose. She saw three drops of blood on the snow, a half-whispered echo of her own mother's voice.

 

 _A child with skin as white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair as black as the raven's wing_.

 

Ravenna turned her eyes to the west.

 

For good or ill, she knew where it was she had to go.

 

 

_Finis._

 

**Author's Note:**

> The _lorelei_ is a legend from the Rhine Valley in Germany. Much like the sirens of Homer's _Odyssey_ , she is a mermaid who lures sailors to their deaths with her songs. Not to be confused with the Rhinemaidens of Wagner's Ring Cycle, who are dangerous and elusive water-witches protecting a vast store of treasure. 
> 
> The story of the knight, the queen, and the fairy maiden is the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman romance _Lanval_ , written by Marie de France. Ravenna's adventures in the Carpathians are roughly based on the life and reputation of the late sixteenth-century Countess Erzsébet Báthory, notorious for having murdered hundreds of young women. The count referenced in the story is of course Vlad Tepeš 'The Impaler.'
> 
> The background for the magic mirror is my own speculation and based on a mishmash of different theories. Although the mirror in the film has runes carved along the border ([not a great quality image, but here](http://exposachicago.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/111112_otrc_snow_white_huntsman_mirror.jpg?w=600&h=352)), the closest Norse analogue I found was the well of Odin, which was a bit of a stretch (even taking into account the ravens of Thought and Memory). So I chose to make the runes a red herring and link the mirror to an older tradition of _catoptromancy_ (Greek: mirror-divination) emerging from ancient Persia, which also explains (or at the very least handwaves *g*) why the mirror can be a source of magical energy without doing much more than informing Ravenna about whether or not she's the fairest in the land.
> 
> My choice to set the story in an alternate Europe emerged from what I thought was a peculiar attitude toward religion in _Snow White & the Huntsman_. The first lines we hear from Snow are from the sixteenth-century Book of Common Prayer and very much recognisable, but this oddity is never really explored. I also like the idea of Ravenna's magic having a much larger, unintended, impact, effectively forcing history to branch in a different direction.


End file.
